[AusNOG] LNS Thoughts

[Julien Goodwin]

On 08/09/10 00:46, Skeeve Stevens wrote:
> The Juniper MX80 is coming with LNS functionality, but isn’t here yet...
> but looks nice for the bang for buck when it is an option.  Anyone else
> have thoughts?

So, the MX80. It *is* shipping, and has more throughput capacity then
the vast majority of ISP's in this country need, even if it was the only
LNS in use.

It's a real hardware router, and once you know the over-subscription
points you're unlikely to ever max it out in raw routing (including
VPN's and MPLS)

Now for the downsides:
* Several months back (prior to MX80 ship) I was told ETA for L2TP on
"Trio" cards (which includes the whole MX80) was "early next year"
* The control plane is an embedded PPC, not the standard Intel unit
Juniper normally use. It's likely to be a little anaemic when stressed,
and would probably be the limiting factor in scaling.
* Limited hardware redundancy inside the unit (see MX240 if you want that)
* Compared to the Cisco 7200 the interface cards are *EXPENSIVE*,
although competitive in price to their Cisco equivalents

As for pricing, once configured & licenced, I'd expect to see it for
about $50k (Juniper's price lists regularly leak, ask your dealer for
actual pricing)

It would be neat if Juniper released a 1ru MX40 with 2x 10Gbe and one
line card slot, but even if they did I doubt it would be any cheaper in
practice.

As to the ERX line, for my point of view they are a line with no future,
but Juniper did confirm they have an actual feature roadmap and plans
for support for many years. They have thousands of them out in *very*
large customers who would stop buying much more expensive TX Matrixes if
burnt. I wouldn't buy them, but then I wouldn't buy an SSG (NetScreen,
now replaced by JunOS running SRX) either.